


Bartholomew

by VirginiasWolf



Category: Law & Order: Criminal Intent
Genre: Angst, F/M, Ghostly Visions, Terminal Illnesses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-14
Updated: 2019-08-14
Packaged: 2020-08-23 06:15:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20238091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VirginiasWolf/pseuds/VirginiasWolf
Summary: Bobby Goren is dying of terminal cancer, and as he lies in the hospital, visions of the past come back to him.





	Bartholomew

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is inspired by challenging myself to shuffle my Ipod and write a fic about a pairing or fandom I was given based on the song that came up. The song that came up was Bartholomew by The Silent Comedy, which explains both the fic title and the heavy vein of angst here. Also, despite having wrote a similar fic not that long ago, I swear my mental health is fine.

“The patient in 303 had another rough night. He was crying out for her again, asking for forgiveness.”

  
It was nothing short of heartbreaking for the entire hospital staff to watch the decline of Robert Goren. The old man seemed to have no family to speak of, although it was dubious that he would be able to tell if he did. The cancer had ravaged his brain so thoroughly that days of lucidity were a thing of the past. He seemed to have no shortage of visitors, but none of them were the kind that the doctors could actually see. The most common visitor seemed to be Alex Eames.

  
From what little information could be gathered from newspaper articles and anecdotal reports, Eames had once been his police partner. Over two decades earlier, the pair had been sweeping a warehouse when a suspect had surprised her. Eames had been a small woman who was easily overpowered by the suspect and by the time Goren had rushed from the other side of the warehouse at the sound of gunshots, she had already been lying dead.

  
Although it had sounded as if Goren had never fully recovered from this incident, the guilt had been fully bought to the surface as he grew closer to slipping from this life into the next. It seemed that when he wasn’t sleeping, he was crying out, usually to her, and so the tortured wails of a dying man became almost background noise in the terminal patient ward.

  
Then, one unusually tempestuous and stormy August night, the cries were actually answered.

  
“Shh, Bobby. It’s okay. It wasn’t your fault.” A woman’s voice carried down the hall from room 303. 

  
At first, the night orderly thought that perhaps he was hearing things, or that another patient had wandered into the room. Then he remembered that there were no female patients currently, and no female staff on the ward tonight.

  
The orderly rushed down the hall to see the spectral figure of a petite blonde woman hovering over Goren’s bed. The woman bent down to plant a kiss on the dying man’s forehead before disappearing.

  
With that, Robert Goren smiled softly and whispered “Alex,” before his eyes closed and the heart monitor went flat.


End file.
